Adventures in Friendship eBook

“As I grow older it seems a shorter and shorter
step between child and child. David, she has
a child of her own,’’

“But I didn’t know—­she isn’t—­”

“A woods child,” said the Scotch Preacher.

I could not find a word to say. I remember the
hush of the evening there in the country road, the
soft light fading in the fields. I heard a whippoorwill
calling from the distant woods.

“They made it hard for her,” said the
Scotch Preacher, “especially her older brother.
About four o’clock this afternoon she ran away,
taking her baby with her. They found a note saying
they would never again see her alive. Her mother
says she went toward the river.”

I touched up the mare. For a few minutes the
Scotch Preacher sat silent, thinking. Then he
said, with a peculiar tone of kindness in his voice.

“She was a child, just a child. When I
talked with her yesterday she was perfectly docile
and apparently contented. I cannot imagine her
driven to such a deed of desperation. I asked
her: ’Why did you do it, Anna?’ She
answered, ‘I don’t know: I—­I
don’t know!’ Her reply was not defiant
or remorseful: it was merely explanatory.”

He remained silent again for a long time.

“David,” he said finally, “I sometimes
think we don’t know half as much about human
nature as we—­we preach. If we did,
I think we’d be more careful in our judgments.”

He said it slowly, tentatively: I knew it came
straight from his heart. It was this spirit,
more than the title he bore, far more than the sermons
he preached, that made him in reality the minister
of our community. He went about thinking that,
after all, he didn’t know much, and that therefore
he must be kind.

As I drove up to the bridge, the Scotch Preacher put
one hand on the reins. I stopped the horse on
the embankment and we both stepped out.

“She would undoubtedly have come down this road
to the river,” McAlway said in a low voice.

It was growing dark. When I walked out on the
bridge my legs were strangely unsteady; a weight seemed
pressing on my breast so that my breath came hard.
We looked down into the shallow, placid water:
the calm of the evening was upon it; the middle of
the stream was like a rumpled glassy ribbon, but the
edges, deep-shaded by overhanging trees, were of a
mysterious darkness. In all my life I think I
never experienced such a degree of silence—­of
breathless, oppressive silence. It seemed as
if, at any instant, it must burst into some fearful
excess of sound.

Suddenly we heard a voice—­in half-articulate
exclamation. I turned, every nerve strained to
the uttermost. A figure, seemingly materialized
out of darkness and silence, was moving on the bridge.